RIGHTS-ASIA: Experts Tackle Supply, Demand in Trafficking

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 8 2002 (IPS) - She considers herself among the lucky ones, ‘Ai’, a Thai woman in her early thirties who was saved by a Catholic nun after 10 years of virtual sexual slavery in Japan.

”It was like hell,” she says of her ordeal as a sex worker that began soon after she was trafficked from Thailand at the age of 15.

”My caretaker pressured me and decided to sell me to someone who had contacts in Japan,” she said, recounting how she ended up with a group of five other Thai girls in the vicious grip of Japan’s sex industry.

”They said I would make more money in Japan, everything would be fine,” recalls ‘Ai’, who has no basic education and was brought up by a family she was made to believe were her relatives. She has no record of her parents.

But making money was far from the case, reveals ‘Ai’, who wore a pair of black sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low over her forehead to conceal her identity as she talked to journalists Wednesday.

”I was dead from the first day,” she says. ”After one year, I started to take drugs.”

Not only was she threatened with abuse at the hands of Japan’s notorious Yakuza crime syndicate if she disobeyed commands to sleep with clients, but she was denied her promised salary on grounds that a substantial slice of it was needed to pay for the cost of her journey from Thailand.

”We were told that once our debts are paid off, we would be sold to someone else,” she said during a meeting with journalists here on the sidelines of a conference on trafficking convened by the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) with the support of the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia-Pacific.

Not so fortunate as to escape such agony are thousands of women and children from South-east Asian countries who have been trafficked across national borders by crime syndicates.

According to estimates by UNIFEM, the numbers of women and children trafficked in South-east Asia could be around 225,000 out of a global figure of over 700,000 annually.

The most common countries of origin of trafficked persons in South-east Asia are the poorer ones like Cambodia, Yunnan province in China, Laos, Burma, Thailand and Vietnam. Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, China and Cambodia are the most popular destinations.

The three-day seminar that began on Monday, involving 10 Asian countries and member nations of the European Union, is attempting to conceive more effective ways of helping the victims of trafficking and combating the transnational crime syndicates.

The seminar comes in the wake of efforts to achieve regional cooperation, particularly in trying to close legal loopholes exploited by crime syndicates involved in human trafficking.

UNIFEM, for instance, is stressing a ”gender and rights based initiative” to make headway against this violation of women’s and children’s rights. ”While countries see trafficking as a rights violation, that is not translated into policies across the board,” says Jean D’Cunha, senior programme specialist at UNIFEM.

”Often, in developing interventions to trafficking, issues of national security and national sovereignty are given importance and the issues relating to trafficked women are marginalised,” she says, adding that this leaves little room for efforts to address the social, economic and gender roots of the issue beyond approaching it as a political or consular matter.

D’Cunha states that government actions against trafficking are often ”gender blind,” undermining the very people that governments are trying to help. ”They (governments) reproduce discriminatory stereotypes against women and disempower them,” she says.

”A case in point are the economic initiatives to prevent trafficking. They are largely micro projects that reproduce stereotypes of women in domestic roles, or as unskilled and unproductive,”’ she explains, instead of giving women more options to undercut trafficking.

Equal stress is being placed on addressing the ”demand side of trafficking” at the seminar, says Gun-Britt Andersson, Sweden’s state secretary. Sweden took the lead in October 2000 to combat the trafficking of persons as part of its commitment to the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), a dialogue process between South-east Asian and European governments.

There is a line of thinking that demand is driving trafficking, making it ”a lucrative business,” she told the media. ”This is a new thing, to look at demand in a comprehensive manner.”

According to available records, Japan has the largest sex industry for Asian women, with well over 100,000 women sex workers, many of them Thais and Filipinos.

For its part, New Zealand is being used by traffickers of Thai women as a ”departure point for Japan, Australia and Cyprus,” states the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women for Asia-Pacific, a non-governmental organisation.

In Australia, the coalition adds, international crime syndicates are into trafficking both drugs and women. ”Particularly in Canberra, Victoria and Queensland, Asian women are to be found in prostitution,” it said in a report.

But researchers on trafficking say that tackling demand will not be easy since it is a complex issue.

”You cannot analytically separate demand and supply,” says Julia O’Connell Davidson, a British academic who co-authored a study distributed at the seminar, titled: ‘Trafficking – A Demand-led Problem?’

”The debate on demand has begun but we need more clarity before shaping policy,” she points out. For instance, her study says that ”there is no reason to assume that individuals who wish to exploit others are only or specifically interested in trafficked individuals.”

It adds that though one may be able to identify employers and others who take advantage of cheap and vulnerable labour, ”it does not follow that there is some absolute level of demand for exploitable labour in any given sector that could, in itself, stimulate or drive trafficking”.

”Some campaigners say it is about demand and you should penalise the buyer,” O’Connell Davidson adds. But the research shows it is more complicated than that.”

Meanwhile, survivors of trafficking like ‘Ai’ hope that governments in the region would welcome moves to improve their predicament. ”We didn’t want to sell ourselves. It was something forced on us.”